Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy

TOUGH LIBERAL

COLUMBIA STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN HISTORY

COLUMBIA STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN HISTORY

ALAN BRINKLEY, GENERAL EDITOR

Lawrence S. Wittner, Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1941–1969 1969

Davis R. B. Ross, Preparing for Ulysses: Politics and Veterans During World War II 1969

John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 1972

George C. Herring Jr., Aid to Russia, 1941 – 1946: Strategy, Diplomacy, and the Origins of the Cold War 1973

Alonzo L. Hamby, Beyond the New Deal: Harry S. Truman and American Liberalism 1973

Richard M. Fried, Men Against McCarthy 1976

Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 1976

Carl M. Brauer, John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction 1977

Maeva Marcus, Truman and the Steel Seizure Case: The Limits of Presidential Power 1977

Morton Sosna, In Search of the Silent South: Southern Liberals and the Race Issue 1977

Robert M. Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 1929–1964 1981

Robert M. Hathaway, Ambiguous Partnership: Britain and America, 1944–1947 1981

Leonard Dinnerstein, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust 1982

Lawrence S. Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 1943–1949 1982

Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Patterns in the Dust: Chinese-American Relations and the Recognition Controversy, 1949–1950 1983

Catherine A. Barnes, Journey from Jim Crow: The Desegregation of Southern Transit 1983

Steven F. Lawson, In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965–1982 1985

David R. Colburn, Racial Change and Community Crisis: St. Augustine, Florida, 1877–1980 1985

Henry William Brands, Cold Warriors: Eisenhower ’ s Generation and the Making of American Foreign Policy 1988

Marc S. Gallicchio, The Cold War Begins in Asia: American East Asian Policy and the Fall of the Japanese Empire 1988

Melanie Billings-Yun, Decision Against War: Eisenhower and Dien Bien Phu 1988

Walter L. Hixson, George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast 1989

Robert D. Schulzinger, Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy 1989

Henry William Brands, The Specter of Neutralism: The United States and the Emergence of the Third World, 1947–1960 1989

Mitchell K. Hall, Because of Their Faith: CALCAV and Religious Opposition to the Vietnam War 1990

David L. Anderson, Trapped By Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961 1991

Steven M. Gillon, The Democrats ’ Dilemma: Walter F. Mondale and the Liberal Legacy 1992

Wyatt C. Wells, Economist in an Uncertain World: Arthur F. Burns and the Federal Reserve, 1970–1978 1994

Stuart Svonkin, Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties 1997

Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America 1998

Campbell Craig, Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War 1998

Brett Gary, The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War 1999

Andrea Friedman, Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City: 1909–1945 2000

Eric Rauchway, The Refuge of Affections: Family and American Reform Politics, 1900–1920 2000

Robert C. Cottrell, Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union 2000

Joseph A. Palermo, In His Own Right: The Political Odyssey of Robert F. Kennedy 2001

Wyatt Wells, Antitrust and the Formation of the Postwar World 2002

Cyrus Veeser, A World Safe for Capitalism: Dollar Diplomacy and America ’ s Rise to Global Power 2002

Michael Janeway, The Fall of the House of Roosevelt: Brokers of Ideas and Power from FDR to LBJ 2004

Jonathan Bell, The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years 2004

Thomas Evans, The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism 2006

TOUGH LIBERAL

ALBERT SHANKER AND THE BATTLES OVER SCHOOLS, UNIONS, RACE, AND DEMOCRACY

RICHARD D. KAHLENBERG

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS   NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2007 Richard D. Kahlenberg

Paperback edition, 2009

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-50909-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kahlenberg, Richard D.

Tough Liberal : Albert Shanker and the battles over schools, unions, race, and democracy / Richard D. Kahlenberg.

p. cm.—(Columbia studies in contemporary american history)

Includes bibliographical refererences and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-13496-5 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-13497-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-50909-1 (e-book)

1. Shanker, Albert. 2. Labor leaders—United States—Biography. 3. American Federation of Teachers. I. Title. II. Series.

LB2844.53.U6K34 2007

331.88’1137110092

[B]

2007005399

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

TO THE MEMORY OF RICHARD W. KAHLENBERG

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART I . NEW YORK

1. The Early Years

Rising from Humble Beginnings and Establishing Values

(1928–1952)

2. Creating the United Federation of Teachers

(1952–1962)

3. Rising Within the UFT

Labor and Civil Rights Together

(1962–1965)

4. Black Power and the 1967 Teachers’ Strike

(1966–1968)

5. The Ocean Hill–Brownsville Strike and the Liberal Assault on Labor

(1968)

6. Ocean Hill–Brownsville

The Fallout

(1969)

7. Rebuilding

Recruiting the Paraprofessionals, Launching the Where We Stand Column, and Seeking Teacher Unity

(1969–1972)

8. Becoming President of the American Federation of Teachers and Battling the New Politics Movement

(1972–1974)

9. A Man by the Name of Albert Shanker

Sleeper and the Controversy of Power

(1973–1975)

10. Losing Power:

The New York Fiscal Crisis and the Decline of Labor

(1974–1976)

PART II. WASHINGTON

11. Jimmy Carter and the Rise of the Reagan Democrats

(1976–1980)

12. Being a Social Democrat Under Ronald Reagan

Domestic Policy

(1980–1988)

13. Being a Social Democrat Under Ronald Reagan

Foreign Policy

(1980–1988)

14. Education Reform

A Nation at Risk, Merit Pay, and Peer Review

(1983–1984)

15. Beyond Special Interest

Making Teaching a Profession

(1985–1987)

16. Charter Schools and School Restructuring

(1988–1997)

17. The Early Education-Standards Movement

(1989–1994)

18. The Rise of the Angry White Males and the Gingrich Revolution

(1992–1995)

19. Reviving the Education-Standards Movement and the Final Days

(1995–1997)

PART III. LEGACY

20. The Legacy of Albert Shanker

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

INTRODUCTION

IT is the peculiar fate of Albert Shanker that he is probably best remembered for something he never did. In Woody Allen’s 1973 sciencefiction comedy Sleeper, Allen’s character wakes up two hundred years in the future to learn that civilization was destroyed when a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.¹ Shanker was considered by many New Yorkers, particularly liberals like Allen, to be a hothead and union thug for shutting down the entire New York City school system with bitter strikes in 1967 and 1968. As head of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the nation’s largest union local, Shanker led a fourteen-day strike in 1967 and a thirty-six-day series of strikes in 1968, closing down the nation’s largest public-school system and throwing the lives of one million students and their parents into chaos.² His power to disrupt the school system was bad enough for his critics, but both incidents stirred up racial animosity, particularly between black parents and Jewish teachers. Shanker was denounced not only as a power monger for crippling the city’s schools, but also as a racist for opposing the black community’s quest for greater self-determination and control over the schools. Because it was illegal for New York’s public employees to strike, Shanker was jailed after both incidents. When Woody Allen was writing the script for Sleeper and wondered whose name to use for a joke about a madman who had destroyed the world, he tried out a number of possibilities with people at Elaine’s Restaurant. The name Albert Shanker got the biggest laugh.³

Almost a quarter century later, however, it was a seemingly very different Albert Shanker who was eulogized at a ceremony featuring leading dignitaries at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. President Bill Clinton, using crutches following a recent accident, hobbled to the stage and spoke of Albert Shanker, the head of the national American Federation of Teachers (AFT) from 1974 to 1997, as an educational statesman, a personal mentor, and one of the most important teachers of the twentieth century. Clinton lauded Shanker as a champion of equity, recognizing that the education-standards movement Shanker led was essential for democracy to work, because it was the only way we could give every child, without regard to their background, a chance to live up to his or her God-given capacity.⁴ Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, speaking in his idiosyncratic clipped tones, painted Shanker as an intellectual and a gifted writer whose celebrated Where We Stand column appeared in the Sunday New York Times. The impact was extraordinary, Moynihan said. Union leaders in those days rarely wrote essays, still less felicitous, thoughtful analyses of public policy.⁵

The list of speakers that day—which included Vice President Al Gore and Education Secretary Richard Riley—was evidence that Shanker was a powerful individual, as Woody Allen suggested, but speaker after speaker said Shanker exercised power well and judiciously: to upgrade the teaching profession, to promote democracy abroad, and to improve public education for American schoolchildren.

Some have hypothesized that there were two Albert Shanker’s—a bad Al and a good Al. The bad Al was the early, militant teachers’ union leader who thirsted for power and poisoned race relations. The good Al came much later and was the statesman who led his union in the direction of education reform, even as parochial elements within the AFT fiercely resisted.

But the presence of Lorretta Johnson, one of the speakers at the ceremony that day, suggested the story wasn’t so simple. A stout African American woman, Johnson was head of the AFT’s division of paraprofessionals, a group of mostly black and Latino teacher aides, many of them former welfare mothers, who were hired with federal money to help in low-income schools beginning in the 1960s.

Racial tensions ran high following the 1968 teachers’ strike, which centered on the question of whether local black leaders had the right to dismiss tenured unionized white teachers and replace them, often with black teachers, as part of an effort to give ghetto communities greater control over their schools. Shanker was a hero of the white middle class, which backed him for standing up to black militants, but Shanker, who had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, wanted to make it clear that the issue was not black versus white, but the right of workers to be treated with dignity. Many of the black teacher aides had crossed the picket lines during the teachers’ strike to try to keep schools open. But when Shanker saw the opportunity to organize the paras, who were making as little as two dollars an hour, he jumped at the chance. Shanker met fierce resistance from many teachers, some of whom did not want a union of professionals to include less-educated aides, many of whom were high-school dropouts.

But Shanker was adamant. He saw organizing the paras as a way of proving that the UFT was a racially inclusive organization, and he laid out a vision in which the union would negotiate a career ladder, by which paras could go back to school and become teachers and thereby better integrate the teaching profession. When some teachers continued to balk, Johnson noted, Shanker threatened to resign as president. It was, she said, the only time he did that in his career.⁶

Teachers eventually went along, and the UFT ended up beating out a rival union that unsuccessfully tried to paint Shanker as a racist. The paras did not see Shanker as anti-black; they saw him as someone who went on strike—and went to jail—in order to defend his members, and they wanted to be a part of his organization. Johnson told the audience that when Shanker later retired as president of the UFT, he said of all the things he had done, he was proudest of organizing the paras and providing them with better wages and a program in which they could go back to school and become teachers.⁷ The bad Al of the 1960s, to Johnson, did not sound so bad after all.

The ceremony ended with President Clinton, Senator Moynihan, Lorretta Johnson, and hundreds of audience members singing Solidarity Forever.

Al Shanker was a man constantly on the go. As president of the UFT in New York City and the AFT nationally, he was forever giving speeches, negotiating contracts, testifying before Congress, walking picket lines, and meeting with unionist and human-rights activists abroad. He was constantly churning out new ideas, which he outlined in some 1,300 weekly columns, commenting on education reform, unions, race relations, and politics. He was passionate about his work, traveled 300,000 to 500,000 miles a year, and had little time for his family. (He took his wife, Eadie, to a union conference for their honeymoon.)

He thought about running for mayor of New York City in the late 1960s, when polls showed he could beat Republican John Lindsay, and he was mentioned as a possible U.S. secretary of education in the early 1990s under Bill Clinton. In both cases, he concluded he was better positioned to fight for what he cared about as a leader of the UFT and AFT. As head of a union of teachers, he stood at the intersection of the two great engines for equality in the United States—public education and organized labor—and he was not about to give that up. He once told an interviewer, If I didn’t have to make a living, I would have done this as a volunteer.⁸

A Father of Modern Teachers’ Unions

Shanker lived the lives of several men in a single lifetime. In 1960, when collective bargaining for teachers was generally thought impossible because it was illegal for public employees to go on strike, Shanker and a handful of other teachers in New York City convinced several thousand colleagues to break the law and risk being fired. Because the school board could not dismiss all the striking teachers, it backed down and eventually recognized the right of the UFT to bargain on behalf of teachers. Other teachers joined on, and from 1960 to 1968, union representation grew from 5 percent of New York City’s teaching staff to 97 percent.⁹ With collective bargaining came a huge change in the culture of teaching. Teachers were accustomed to being pushed around: they were poorly paid, forced to eat their lunches while supervising students, and told to bring a doctor’s note if they were out sick. Collective bargaining brought them higher salaries and also greater dignity.¹⁰

He was the George Washington of the teaching profession, said union leader Tom Mooney. He’s the one who rallied us to liberate ourselves.¹¹ Like George Washington, Shanker was hardly alone in helping to light the spark of teacher unionism in New York City. He was one of several leaders, including Charles Cogen, president of the UFT at the time, and David Selden, an AFT organizer. But Shanker soon outpaced his colleagues, leading the union to far greater heights.

The influence of Shanker and his colleagues was felt far beyond New York City, as the UFT’s example caught fire and teachers pushed for collective bargaining in Detroit, Philadelphia, and city after city. The nation’s largest teachers’ organization, the National Education Association (NEA), was adamantly opposed to collective bargaining. But as NEA leaders witnessed the AFT’s dramatic gains in membership, the NEA was forced to reverse its position or risk losing its preeminent status.

With collective bargaining, membership in teachers’ unions skyrocketed. During a period when the American trade-union movement saw dramatic decline, the AFT grew from sixty thousand members in 1961 to close to one million at the time of Shanker’s death in 1997.¹² The NEA saw comparable growth, and schools became, after the postal service, the most heavily unionized sector in the United States.¹³ Today, teachers’ unions are broadly believed to be the most influential single force in American education.¹⁴

Influential Education Reformer

Having been one of the founding fathers of teacher unionism would have been an extraordinary legacy by itself. But then, in Act II, Shanker became the most influential education reformer of the second half of the twentieth century. He did so not by changing jobs but by utterly transforming the role of teachers’ union leader.

Shanker saw that by the early 1980s the great labor agenda of the previous epoch—Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, the minimum wage, and civil rights—had run into a political cul-de-sac. But education still had political backing, and in 1983, Shanker, virtually alone within the liberal education establishment, embraced the report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, entitled A Nation at Risk, which ushered in a quarter century of education reform. While teachers’ unions were being reviled as special-interest groups that blocked promising reforms, Shanker let loose with a flurry of his own reform proposals that one newspaper said made the AFT look as much like a think tank as a union.¹⁵

When unions were attacked for protecting incompetent teachers, Shanker backed a controversial peer-review plan, in which master teachers would evaluate incoming and veteran teachers, weeding out those not up to the job. He also astounded critics when he proposed a rigorous national competency exam for new teachers, a concept anathema to the NEA. When unions were attacked for opposing efforts to reward talent through merit pay of teachers, Shanker devised a plan to recognize superior performance with greater pay without leaving the decisions open to favoritism by principals. He proposed what would become the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which provides for teachers what board certification does for doctors. Each of these policies was offered not merely as a defensive maneuver against critics of teachers’ unions but as part of an affirmative vision to make teaching not just an occupation but a true profession.

Shanker also proposed innovations to restructure schools and in 1988 popularized the idea of charter schools, public schools that would be set up by groups of teachers and be permitted to experiment with different educational approaches. The idea was widely embraced: in 1990, there were no charter schools; today, there are more than 3,600.¹⁶ Over time, however, the reform went in very different directions than Shanker intended, and he grew increasingly critical of the movement he had helped to father.

Shanker’s greatest impact on education reform came with his decision to embrace a system of education standards, testing, and accountability comparable to what most leading European and Asian nations had. There was enormous resistance to standards from the left (civil-rights groups, education professors, the NEA) and from the right (advocates of local control and states’ rights). But Shanker broke with the education establishment and joined with governors and business leaders to push what today, remarkably, has become the leading education reform in the United States. While the movement has many participants and advocates, Shanker was generally seen as the most fervent, powerful, and consistent leader. He pounded away at the theme that educators had to give students a real incentive to do well. As a former teacher, he often told others that when he gave homework or a quiz, the class invariably shouted out, Does it count?¹⁷ Although no one liked to be held accountable, Shanker argued that human nature required that public education use incentives, making it more like the private marketplace, without abandoning the fundamental public nature of schools.

Taken together—his role as a father of modern teachers’ unions and his role as a leading education reformer—Shanker was arguably the single individual most responsible for preserving public education in the United States during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Whenever private school–voucher proposals surface through ballot initiatives or legislation, the powerful teachers’ unions that Shanker helped create are the most important political opponents. But if the AFT under Shanker had not transformed itself and joined the education-reform debates, the case against vouchers would have been weaker, and more forays from proponents of privatization might well have prevailed. Shanker’s defense against vouchers—fighting to change public education in order to preserve it—was far more effective, says education writer Thomas Toch, than those in the education establishment, who merely called for more money to address problems that they frequently argued didn’t exist.¹⁸ While the United States economy as a whole is far more market oriented than most countries, 90 percent of students remain in government-run public schools. No individual in the past generation is more responsible for this anomaly than Albert Shanker.

Though Shanker held no public office, he became supremely influential, his name constantly invoked in education circles. In the course of the past two decades, educator and author E. D. Hirsch Jr. wrote in 1997, Albert Shanker made himself the most important figure in American education.¹⁹ While secretaries of education came and went, as did presidents of the much larger NEA, Shanker endured, and he outdid and out-thought all of them. If Horace Mann was the key educational figure in the nineteenth century and John Dewey in the first half of the twentieth century, Albert Shanker has stood as the most influential figure since then. As a central thinker, writer, and player in all the great education debates of the last quarter century—whether school vouchers, charter schools, or education standards—he was, journalist Sara Mosle argues, our Dewey.²⁰

Advocate of Tough Liberalism

But that was not all. Shanker had a third life as well, as a combatant in the fight for the future of American liberalism. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, he was in the thick of the great battles waged among liberals over race, unions, American foreign policy, and the direction of the Democratic Party. Shanker clashed with factions within the American left—the New Left and the New Politics movements—that jettisoned the notion of colorblindness in favor of racial preferences and identity politics, saw labor and working-class voters as reactionary rather than central to the liberal coalition, and rejected muscular cold-war liberalism in favor of a dovish, often isolationist, foreign policy. In this endeavor, unlike his others, he and like-minded advocates were mostly unsuccessful, and the meaning of American liberalism changed dramatically.

Shanker believed in what might be called tough liberalism, an ideology that champions an affirmative role for government in promoting social mobility, social cohesion, and greater equality at home and democracy abroad, but which is also tough-minded about human nature, the way the world works, and the reality of evil. He remained, to the end, a liberal, and over a thirty-year period he stood squarely for two central pillars of liberal thought: public education and organized labor. But he also thought liberals were wrong on many of the great issues of the day. Shanker was a Harry Truman/Scoop Jackson Democrat and a Cold Warrior who disagreed with liberals on Vietnam in the 1960s and on detente with the Soviet Union in the 1970s. He believed liberals did not go far enough to support democratic forces in Poland and in Nicaragua in the 1980s, and he opposed liberal efforts to cut defense spending. An early supporter of the civil-rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, Shanker stood virtually alone among union leaders in consistently raising questions about liberal support for racial preferences, arguing instead for broad-based affirmative-action programs for economically needy people of all races. He similarly opposed certain extreme forms of bilingual education and multiculturalism, which he saw as separatist. And Shanker disagreed with liberals on the role of organized labor in the Democratic coalition. He thought it was a grave mistake to move from a working-class party toward one that centered around women, minorities, and upper-middle-class white reformers.

Shanker’s views on defense and quotas put him in conflict with Jimmy Carter. For that reason, some pegged Shanker as a neoconservative, until he decided to endorse not Ronald Reagan but Ted Kennedy for president. As Bill Clinton noted at the memorial service, Al Shanker would say something on one day that would delight liberals and infuriate conservatives. The next day, he would make conservatives ecstatic and the liberals would be infuriated.²¹ People could not figure him out. They called him a right-wing socialist and a neanderthal liberal.²²

He was a complex individual: a pacifist in his youth who became a leading defense and foreign-policy hawk, an intellectual who was also a populist and communicated easily with nonintellectuals, a gifted public speaker who was unable to make small talk, a liberal whose biggest enemies were often on the left, a gifted writer who had to pay to have his ideas published, a fierce critic of philanthropic foundations who later served on the boards of two of them, a man who devoted his life to improving the education of children but spent little time with his own kids, a man largely ignorant of pop culture who was cited in television shows and movies, and a tough unionist with a gruff manner who enjoyed shopping and baking bread and detested talking about sports.²³

Throughout his life, Shanker continually rowed against the tide. He was one of the only Jewish kids growing up in a tough Catholic neighborhood. He began as a teacher’s union activist at a time when no one thought it was possible to organize public employees and then headed a growing union in an era when unions were in decline. He was a leading education reformer at a time when teachers’ unions were generally written off as the greatest obstacles to reform. And he was a proponent of colorblindness, first in an era when his stance was considered radical and later in an era when it was considered conservative. Because he did not shrink from fights, his positions often sparked tremendous controversy. Issues of race and issues of war are notoriously volatile. And his main passion—education—aroused strong emotion because it deals with people’s children and with society’s future.²⁴

Shanker’s tough liberal philosophy was wrong on some of the major issues of the day. It is hard to defend his relatively hawkish position on the war in Vietnam, to take one important example. But today, when liberals are accused of not standing for anything, it is important to note that Shanker had a coherent ideology. He articulated a cogent rationale for his collection of liberal and conservative views that bridged traditional categories without merely splitting differences. For Shanker, all roads led back to democracy.

He was for strong and free trade unions primarily because of their democratic virtues. They gave workers a democratic voice at the workplace and in the Congress, checking the unbridled economic power of corporations. They helped strengthen the formation of a middle class necessary to a democracy. And they served as a crucial check against governmental power, which is why authoritarian governments sought to crush them. There is no freedom or democracy without trade unionism, he said.²⁵ Likewise, Shanker opposed vouchers and supported strong public schools because he believed schools were more than a place to train future employees; they were institutions that taught democratic citizenship and helped bind diverse peoples together as Americans.

But democracy also underpinned his conservative positions. Shanker’s support for trade unionism also translated into an unrelenting anti-Communism. Why was it liberal to stand by while Polish authorities crushed Solidarity, or while Nicaraguan Sandinistas beat up union leaders, or while the North Vietnamese arrested the leadership of the independent labor federation in the South, he asked. He also thought that in a democracy it was essential to have a single standard for individuals of all races, and he opposed all privileges associated with race. He recognized a need to take affirmative action to address the legacy of past racial discrimination, but he argued that extra help should be made available for economically disadvantaged people of all races. He quarreled with certain progressive educators who pushed fads that were soft on teaching academic content and distorted history in order to boost the self-esteem of minority groups. He believed, with E. D. Hirsch Jr., that if one really wished to be a political progressive concerned about disadvantaged kids, one needed to be an educational conservative who stood for teaching students certain core knowledge that was essential to upward mobility in American society.

Shanker argued that tough liberalism was not only consistent and democratic but was also politically attractive, because it addressed the central vulnerabilities of liberalism, which since the 1960s has been seen as soft, elitist, politically correct, and out of touch with the way the world works. Democrats have done fairly well in recent decades with what political scientists call the moderate middle, upscale socially liberal and fiscally conservative citizens. But they have been trounced by voters who make up the radical center, downscale, patriotic citizens who are concerned about right and wrong, angry about abuses of power by the wealthy, and want more government support for working families. During Shanker’s lifetime, the radical center went from being the backbone of the Democratic Party to its Achilles’ heel. And liberalism went from being a proud moniker to an epithet, so reviled, as Peter Beinart notes, that its adherents dare not speak its name.²⁶ Shanker believed that issues of national security and race were central to the collapse of American liberalism politically, and he articulated a different path on these questions—a path he believed was not conservative but, like the economic populism he also embraced, profoundly democratic. Shanker’s tough liberalism was highly controversial and largely dismissed during his lifetime as being unorthodox and inconsistent. But as contemporary American liberalism struggles both for intellectual coherence and political viability, Albert Shanker’s life reminds us that there is an alternative tough liberal tradition wholly worthy of reviving.

I

NEW YORK

1

The Early Years

RISING FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS AND ESTABLISHING VALUES 1928–1952

WHEN Albert Shanker was born on September 14, 1928, he emerged from the womb with a large red birthmark on the right side of his neck running over the back of his head. His mother, Mamie Shanker, was beside herself. What will ever become of him? she asked.¹ In a childhood that would be marked by many struggles—deprivation and discrimination, the Great Depression and the rise of Adolf Hitler—it was not an auspicious beginning.

Albert Shanker (he had no English middle name) was the first-born child of Morris Shanker, a newspaper deliveryman, and Mamie Burko Shanker, a garment worker.² Both of Shanker’s parents were Eastern European Jewish immigrants, coming from a part of Poland that was at times under the control of Russia.³ Shanker’s mother came to America prior to World War I, and his father just following the war, both seeking to escape the anti-Jewish pogroms and have a better life.⁴

Mamie Shanker, who was born in 1894, came from a prominent intellectual Minsk family. Her father, Abraham Yehudi Burko, was highly educated and a large landowner and timber producer. As a Jew, however, he could not own land in his own name, and when he was killed in a horrific accident, being trampled by horses, his Gentile partner, in whose name the land was held, took over the land and the family became destitute. Mamie’s mother, Rachel Burko, eked out a living by selling herbs to people who were sick.⁵

The family had little food, and it was considered a treat on the Sabbath to have a small piece of chicken the size of a noodle. As Jews, it was a terrifying time to live in Russia, and the Cossacks were a constant threat. The leadership of Czar Alexander III and Nicholas II was particularly repressive, and during the years of their rule (1891–1917), one-third of Eastern European Jews fled their homeland, an exodus comparable to the flight from the Spanish Inquisition.⁶ One of Mamie Shanker’s half-sisters was raped by soldiers and died soon after. During one pogrom, a Gentile neighbor hid Mamie in a barrel underneath a pile of potatoes in order to keep her alive. Finally, as a teenager, she walked through the forests and made her way to Germany in order to get to the United States.⁷

When she came to America, her half-brother was already here, and he took her on as a sewing-machine operator.⁸ The occupation was common for Jewish immigrants, because many garment industry owners were Jewish and were willing to hire other Jews, and because English was not required.⁹ Though a manual laborer, Mamie Shanker was an intellectual who liked to read poetry and discuss Yiddish books and literature. An opera buff, she bought standing-room-only tickets when she could.¹⁰ She was feisty and a tough negotiator. Al Shanker later recalled, I’d have to wait half an hour while she bought three tomatoes.¹¹ She was a strong personality—a force to be reckoned with.¹²

If Mamie was fiery, Shanker’s father, Morris, was soft spoken.¹³ Born just before the turn of the century, he studied in Europe to be a rabbi until his family ran out of money for his education, just short of his ordination.¹⁴ During World War I, he served in the czar’s army then immigrated to the United States, where he went to work for the Ford Motor Company in Detroit. As the company was deeply anti-Semitic, life there was intolerable, so after a time Morris Shanker came to New York, where he later began a grueling job delivering newspapers.¹⁵

In December 1927, the thirty-year-old Morris Shanker and the thirty-three-year-old Mamie Burko were united in an arranged marriage, as was not uncommon for new Jewish immigrants.¹⁶ Morris Shanker was considered attractive, but Mamie Shanker was not: she was overweight and her face had been scarred by severe acne as a child. Her comparative age was also considered a substantial deficit in a bride, but Morris Shanker’s family mistakenly believed that the Burkos had a great deal of money.¹⁷ The couple lived in a cramped apartment with a communal bathroom down the hallway, on Clinton Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.¹⁸ To make matters worse, Mamie Shanker insisted that her mother, Rachel Burko, live with the couple, an arrangement that did not promote happiness in the family.¹⁹

Long Island City

Albert Shanker was born in September 1928, ten months after the couple was married. A year and a half later, a sister, Pearl, was born, and the family moved from Clinton Street to Long Island City, a neighborhood in Queens.²⁰ The five family members—the parents, the children, and the grandmother—lived in a small ground-level apartment a block from the Queensboro Plaza subway station.²¹ The Shankers would hear the elevated subway trains going by at all hours, and the apartment’s windowsills were blackened with dust from the trains and nearby factories.²²

The Shanker apartment had three bedrooms—one for the parents, one for Pearl and her grandmother, and one for Al. Al’s bedroom was roughly six feet by nine feet, with room for a bed, a tiny dresser, and a small closet, which jutted out into the room.²³ By the time he was thirteen years old, he was taller than the bed and slept with his feet sticking out of the door.²⁴ The bathroom had a tub and a toilet, but no room for a sink, so hands were washed in the kitchen sink.²⁵

The crowded circumstances were exacerbated by the fact that Morris Shanker had to store his newspapers in the living room.²⁶ (He had no separate warehouse or office.) It was as if newspapers were part of the furniture.²⁷ In advance of the big Sunday newspapers, Pearl recalls, papers would be piled up above our heads and there would just be a narrow aisle to walk from the bedroom to the kitchen.²⁸ The cramped environment added to the tension in the household. The marriage wasn’t happy, Pearl recalled years later. The parents were not close to each other, and there were many arguments and a great deal of name calling.²⁹

Mamie and Morris Shanker both worked grueling jobs. Al Shanker recalled that his father, using a pushcart, would set out at two in the morning to deliver the papers, and he’d be back at seven in the morning, totally exhausted. And then he’d have some coffee and some breakfast. Then, at ten o’clock, the afternoon papers would come out, and he’d start all over.³⁰ Morris Shanker had about twenty papers to deliver in various languages.³¹ Many of the deliveries were to apartment buildings, five and six stories high, none with elevators.³² In addition, on Sundays, Morris Shanker, with the help of his family, would sell papers as parishioners came out of Mass. Through several services and in all sorts of weather, the Shankers would stand for hours selling papers from a pushcart.³³

Al Shanker later said that as a child he hardly ever saw his father, whom he knew as this angry, disgruntled guy who grabbed a roll and coffee and went out to work again.³⁴ The work was not only physically exhausting, it was dispiriting for a man who was educated and had talents that were not being put to use. Al’s boyhood friend Vincent Castanza remembers wondering: why was this bright man delivering newspapers?³⁵

Meanwhile, Mamie Shanker worked seventy-hour weeks at J&J Clothing in lower Manhattan to help supplement her husband’s salary.³⁶ She would sit at work, sweating, in deep concentration.³⁷ One time Al went to visit her and was unable to recognize her among the essentially anonymous group of toiling women. He was horrified.³⁸

Despite two incomes, the Shanker family, like many families during the Depression, had little money. They did not own a car, never owned a home, and rarely traveled or took vacations. They didn’t have a telephone in the apartment until the late 1940s, and the Shanker children generally wore secondhand clothes. The Shankers did have enough food, however, which made them better off than some of the families in the neighborhood.³⁹ The attention to nutrition apparently paid off, for Al would grow to tower over his more diminutive parents.⁴⁰

From a very young age, Al Shanker was a contentious child. His sister Pearl recalls that he had his own opinions and would argue with my parents. He would argue with anybody if he disagreed.⁴¹ When other family members pitched in to put the sections of the Sunday paper together, or to sell papers on Sundays, she says that Al refused to participate.⁴²

Al ran into trouble when he began elementary school at P.S. 4 in Queens.⁴³ Because the family primarily spoke Yiddish in the home, Al went to school not knowing any English, and he quickly fell behind.⁴⁴ At first he could not even go to the bathroom because he did not know how to ask to do so in English.⁴⁵ One of his early teachers made fun of his accent, which only encouraged his classmates to pick on him.⁴⁶ He sometimes did not do his homework.⁴⁷ Shanker recalled, I didn’t work very hard in school…. There were a lot of things in school I was bored with and if I was bored with something I didn’t do it and would get into trouble.⁴⁸

His cousin Lillian Feldman said Al had no interest in what was going on in the classroom and would come home with failing marks. Mamie Shanker would wring her hands over his poor grades.⁴⁹ Al got into trouble frequently, and his mother took him to counseling when he was a young child. Some relatives even suggested that he be sent to reform school to be straightened out.⁵⁰

Pearl Shanker was more pliant and was an academic superstar who outshone her older brother.⁵¹ She got along well with her father, in part because she was more conforming than Al. Morris Shanker was away working most of the time, Pearl says, but what time he had, I got, and Al did not.⁵² She notes, my father was never, never close to Al…. Al never got any affection from my father.⁵³

Al’s mother had a greater influence on him than his father, but she could be overbearing. Shanker later told colleagues that his home was not a particularly loving or supportive environment.⁵⁴ After Al was married, his wife Eadie recalled, Mamie would call and he wouldn’t answer the phone. He would run from her.⁵⁵ She was controlling of Al and nagged him a lot, a boyhood friend remembers.⁵⁶

Young Al did develop a very affectionate relationship with his grandmother. The two would go on long walks and she would tell him stories in Yiddish.⁵⁷ She really brought me up, Shanker said, since both my mother and father worked.⁵⁸ She treated him like a prince and would tell him: You are very special. You’re exceptional. You are going to be a great man.⁵⁹ Al’s sister Pearl recalls that to Rachel Burko, the sun rose and set on him. He was perfect. Al was named after Rachel’s deceased husband, and she told young Al he would do great things.⁶⁰

Outside the tense and crowded household, there was little benefit from escape. On top of deprivation, there was discrimination. Growing up in the 1930s, before the Holocaust, anti-Semitism was virulent and mainstream. Shanker’s parents read to him about what was happening to the Jews in Germany with the rise of Hitler: the passage of the Nuremberg laws, when Al was six; the Kristallnacht, when Al was nine; and Hitler’s invasion of Poland, when Al was ten.⁶¹ At home in the United States in the late 1930s, radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin’s increasingly anti-Semitic sermons drew a large audience.⁶²

Many Jews sought refuge from discrimination by living in tight-knit Jewish enclaves, where there was some protection from the outer world. Al Shanker did not have that cocoon. The newspaper route that Morris Shanker was assigned to was located in a tough working-class Irish and Italian area with few Jewish families.⁶³ In the neighborhood, Father Coughlin was a mainstay, and during the summer, when the windows were open, Al would hear Coughlin’s anti-Semitic messages being broadcast. At the local church, one of the priests was particularly fond of Coughlin, and the Shankers always knew when he preached because anti-Semitic incidents would increase. Rocks were thrown through the Shanker’s ground-floor apartment window, with notes saying dirty Jew.⁶⁴ Pearl recalls being terrified to walk through the neighborhood in the summer, when people were out on their stoops. In the building next to the Shankers, there was a man who would call out Jews are worse than cats and then kick one of the stray cats that populated the neighborhood.⁶⁵ Sometimes, Mamie Shanker would share extra food with the neighbors’ children, but the gesture did not bring good will and only made them hate the Shankers more.⁶⁶ Shanker recalled, Not all the kids were anti-Semitic or all the parents, but there was enough of it there so you could really cut it with a knife; and it was very open.⁶⁷ To keep the children from having to walk past anti-Semitic neighbors on the way to the library, the Shanker parents bought a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica.⁶⁸

Occasionally, a more tolerant family would move in, and Pearl would find a playmate, but Al never did. There were no friends in the immediate neighborhood at all, she says.⁶⁹ Most of the time, I couldn’t go out and play on the street because I never knew when I would be beaten up next, Al Shanker recalled. So I grew up sort of as an isolate at home with not much to do.⁷⁰

Like all boys, Al just wanted to be accepted, and when he was about eight years old, it looked for a moment as though he might be.⁷¹ A group of neighborhood boys asked Al if he wanted to join their club. He said yes, and they put a blindfold on him for what they said was the initiation process. The group took Al to an empty lot nearby and put a rope around his arms and neck and threw the other end over a branch. They were about to pull him up when Pearl came out, saw what was happening, and screamed. A bystander came over and rescued Al.⁷² The group later said they had strung Al up to avenge the killing of Christ.⁷³

The horrific experience left long-term scars. It was an absolutely traumatic experience for him, says his wife, Eadie. I think something closed in him emotionally.⁷⁴ Said union colleague Sandra Feldman, it had a huge effect on him, making him highly confrontational. It made him never shirk a fight; sometimes he looked for a fight.⁷⁵ Says another union official, Velma Hill: That stayed with him throughout his life.⁷⁶

Once the Shanker children got to school, there was no oasis from the prejudice. Pearl recalls one junior-high teacher told her Hitler was right about the Jews and discouraged her from trying to advance to a competitive high school.⁷⁷ Al Shanker recalled a teacher announcing to the class around Christmas time: For the next few weeks, we’ll be singing Christmas carols, but Albert is Jewish, so he won’t have to sing them, since he doesn’t believe in God. What followed were more beatings from fellow students.⁷⁸

Because none of the neighbors would let their children play with him, young Al spent a lot of time alone, listening to music, collecting stamps, and reading.⁷⁹ I would just go berserk because I had nothing to do, he told the New York Teacher.⁸⁰ He started building hi-fi equipment from sets and spent a lot of time listening to the radio.⁸¹

For much of Shanker’s childhood, then, there was nowhere to hide. There was fighting among family members inside the cramped apartment, Shanker recalled, and once you got out, you got the hell beaten out of you.⁸² Shanker used to sit by himself, staring into the East River, wondering what we Jews had done to make everyone so mad at us.⁸³

If Shanker’s childhood suggested there was abiding unfairness in life—widespread poverty, persistent bigotry—his parents also taught him that certain institutions and ideas could help. One central institution was organized labor. Mamie Shanker had a dark view of human nature and believed employers would do whatever it took to maximize profits. She often talked to her children about how 150 workers were killed in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire because the owners, worried that the workers would steal the garments, locked the doors from the outside. When she first came to the United States as a garment worker, she worked very long hours, had no health benefits, and worked in unsafe conditions.⁸⁴ She joined Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) and was also a member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), headed by David Dubinsky.⁸⁵ The unions made a huge difference in her life, improving her wages and working hours (eventually down to thirty-five hours a week).⁸⁶ Growing up, unions were just below God, Al Shanker said.⁸⁷

So was labor’s champion, Franklin Roosevelt.⁸⁸ When Al was eight, he marched in parades for FDR in the 1936 election.⁸⁹ In 1940, when FDR ran for a third term against Wendell Willkie, twelve-year-old Al stood for hours on a subway platform one afternoon arguing with grownups who didn’t intend to vote for F.D.R., wrote reporter A. H. Raskin. A ticket he had bought for the World’s Fair lay forgotten in his pocket.⁹⁰

Though they voted for Roosevelt, the Shankers were not Democrats. In the New York circles in which Shanker was raised and schooled in the 1930s and 1940s, the question was not whether one was a Democrat or a Republican, but whether one was a Socialist or a Communist.⁹¹ Many Jewish immigrants had been Socialists in Russia, as part of the resistance to czarist rule.⁹² The Yiddish language newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward, had workers of the world unite! emblazoned on the masthead.⁹³ Most writers and intellectuals in New York City leaned toward the Communist Party.⁹⁴ At City College, the Communists outnumbered the anti-Stalinist left by about ten to one.⁹⁵

Shanker was briefly pro-Soviet in high school, but while still a teenager, he read George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and saw how Orwell, who had signed up to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, became disillusioned with the Communists. Shanker later recalled: Here was Orwell, this innocent leftist, who wants to fight the fascists, but the Communists will stop at nothing, including wiping out the non-Stalinist opposition, to make sure they alone emerge in control.⁹⁶ The Spanish Civil War was something that stayed with him for years, recalls his friend Mel Lubin, who said Shanker had six or seven books on the topic.⁹⁷ Al spent many hours debating his Communist cousin, Faye Godlin, and her husband, Al Godlin, who lived fifteen minutes away in Sunnyside, Queens.⁹⁸ One boyhood friend remembers Al leading his buddies to Union Square and Al standing on a soapbox, arguing with Communists.⁹⁹

Another important value stressed in the Shanker household was education—education as a route out of poverty and as a way of reducing prejudice and discrimination. Despite the lack of family wealth, says Pearl, it was always just assumed that we would go to college and be something.¹⁰⁰ Debate and disagreement were expected, she says. We weren’t encouraged to just nod and agree with our parents’ political views or other views. We were encouraged to think about it and read about it.¹⁰¹

Much to the chagrin of his parents, however, Shanker’s embrace of education and intellectual questioning ran headlong into their strongly held religious beliefs. Morris and Mamie were Orthodox Jews, and Shanker’s grandmother Rachel was even more observant and always wore a wig to cover her head as a sign of respect.¹⁰² The family did not ride the subway or light the stove on the Sabbath, except for the father, who worked on Saturdays.¹⁰³ Al attended religious school in advance of his bar mitzvah, and a friend from his class, Edward Flower, recalls that for about a year following his bar mitzvah, Al took religion very seriously. Each morning he would wear Tefillin, a leather box strapped around his arm and his forehead, and read the Jewish law.¹⁰⁴ He would even chastise his parents for not being orthodox enough.¹⁰⁵ Al briefly thought about becoming a rabbi.¹⁰⁶

Over time, however, Al Shanker saw a tension between his parent’s emphasis on orthodox religion and their emphasis on the intellect and education. When Al was about fifteen, he began reading the New Testament. He was excited by it, he later told his wife Eadie, and told his rabbi. The rabbi said it was blasphemy and threw Shanker’s copy of the book out. For Al, she said, anyone who would do that with a book was suspect. If you couldn’t read a book, there was something wrong.¹⁰⁷ Al began exploring other religions, going to other services, and challenging the family’s religious beliefs. My parents were very upset, Pearl says.¹⁰⁸ It was part of a general intellectual questioning, Pearl says, noting Al was particularly interested in humanistic and Unitarian services.¹⁰⁹

In his youth, Shanker’s formative experience was not his religious training but rather his time in the Boy Scouts—the one group that was less anti-Semitic in his experience. Troop 277 met in a community center in a housing project located under the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge.¹¹⁰ The group would go hiking and camping for the weekend, which was an enormous escape for Al.¹¹¹ In the summer, he would attend an inexpensive Boy Scout camp for eight weeks.¹¹² Flower was a member of the Boy Scouts (Al recruited him), as were his friends Vinnie Castanza, Nick La Giglia, and Bill Andrietti.¹¹³

Boy Scouting was good for Al, not only because it got him out of the house and the neighborhood, but because it helped him demonstrate competence to his peers—something he couldn’t do in the normal arena for boys, sports. He had poor eyesight: he was practically blind in one eye and began wearing glasses at age six.¹¹⁴ Because he grew up to his full height of six foot, four inches at age thirteen, he was awkward and a poor athlete, skinny and not particularly muscular. In the Boy Scouts, however, he could excel at earning merit badges—based purely on ability—and he earned everything to attain the rank of Eagle Scout except the merit badge for swimming.¹¹⁵

In December 1941, the bombing of Pearl Harbor meant that many of the adult men who normally led the Boy Scout troops went away in the service, so it fell to the older boys to take up the leadership and organizing roles.¹¹⁶ At age thirteen, Shanker rallied members to demand camping trips; troop membership skyrocketed from seventeen to eighty-five.¹¹⁷ Shanker drew up a petition saying the troop ought to drill less and hike more. It worked: That was sort of my first successful politically rebellious experience, he said.¹¹⁸

The Scouts did include a fair number of tough kids from the projects who would not normally take orders from someone like Al, so he had to work his way into leadership positions artfully. Instead of being appointed patrol leader, he was made the troop scribe, but he expanded the role of that position, and when it came time for parents’ night, it was Al who made the address to the adults.¹¹⁹ Eventually, he became senior patrol leader and essentially ran the troop. Vincent Castanza recalls the adult leaders would come to him for information regarding the Boy Scout program.¹²⁰ Shanker would lead trips of kids for hikes along the Palisades, starting with a subway ride to the George Washington Bridge and a bus trip across the Hudson. Adults rarely went along.¹²¹ Shanker read all the Boy Scout manuals and books on leadership. Years later, Shanker would look back and say that it was in the Boy Scouts where I learned my leadership skills.¹²²

The coming of World War II created a number of other responsibilities for Al. Mamie Shanker was an air-raid warden and Al was assigned to be a bike messenger when air-raid warnings came. He would go around during alerts and make sure people’s lights were out and the window shades were drawn.¹²³ During the war, Al took on other jobs. In 1945, Shanker got an after-school job filing court papers for lawyers with a company called the United Lawyer Service. The position paid roughly six dollars a week, but one day, his friend Ed Flower recalls, Al decided the pay was insufficient, and he organized the twenty or so high-school students, who told their bosses they would not make their deliveries that day unless they got a dollar raise. Shanker knew he had the upper hand, Flower recalls, because there were not many adult men around to do the job. Management capitulated and the boys got their dollar raise. That was Al Shanker’s first successful strike, Flower says.¹²⁴

Having gained confidence in his role as a Boy Scout leader and informal union activist, Shanker became a leader among a small group of friends. In the 1940s, immigrant boys tended be given great freedom by their parents, and Shanker made the most of it, said Flower. We used to roam all over Manhattan and it was like a giant playground.¹²⁵ Flower recalls that Al would lead him and others to visit stamp shops for their collection, go to Central Park, the Museum of Modern Art (where they could also see old movies), the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or inexpensive theaters.¹²⁶

A favorite destination was the newsstands. Shanker would read six or eight papers a day. Years later, he recalled, "As a kid I’d walk over the Queensboro Bridge to the newsstands outside the library on Forty-Second Street. I discovered The Partisan Review when I was fifteen. My subscription to Commentary goes back to 1948."¹²⁷ Al also loved to buy books. As soon as he and Flower were paid by the United Lawyers, they would spend their entire paychecks mostly on books such as the Modern Library series.¹²⁸ Vincent Castanza, an Italian kid who grew up in the projects, remembers being struck visiting Al’s apartment: I would see books all over the place.¹²⁹ His reading often centered on politics, Communism, and labor unions. At age fifteen, he began reading the Socialist philosopher Sidney Hook, and in high school, Al read Irving Stone’s 1943 book Clarence Darrow for the Defense and fell in love with the idea of defending labor leaders.¹³⁰

While in junior high school, Shanker took a test to try to qualify for one of New York’s elite public high schools. Although he had struggled in his very early years, over time he began to excel academically and was accepted to the competitive Stuyvesant High School.¹³¹ Shanker enjoyed Stuyvesant, which drew bright students from across New York City.¹³² At the school, which was heavily left-wing and working class, he graduated 160th out of a class of 635.¹³³

Although not at the very top of his class, Shanker did excel in one extracurricular activity: debate. One former classmate remembers that in the predominantly Jewish high school, Shanker got involved with the debating club and defended the Arabs. He’d win all the time.¹³⁴ The debate team also got Al in some trouble, though. Stuyvesant was all-male in those years, and some administrators thought it was improper for girls to enter the school. When Al invited a girls’ team to compete in a debate tournament, he was punished by the school, which limited the number of colleges to which it would send his transcripts.¹³⁵

Shanker applied to Harvard College but he was rejected, to his great disappointment.¹³⁶ Instead, in 1946 he went off to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.¹³⁷ While some of his friends went to City College, which was excellent, Shanker’s main objective, his friend Ed Flower said, was to get away from home.¹³⁸

On Labor Day weekend in 1946, Shanker boarded a Greyhound bus to Champaign-Urbana. At the first stop, Wheeling, West Virginia, he got off to go to the bathroom and someone took his seat, so he had to stand all the way to Indianapolis. Champaign-Urbana was booming, with a flood of World War II veterans going to college on the GI Bill.¹³⁹

A land-grant college founded in 1867, the University of Illinois was situated in the middle of the state, 140 miles south of Chicago.¹⁴⁰ Because of the influx of veterans, when Shanker arrived there was a substantial housing shortage. At the University’s housing bureau, many postings said White Anglo Saxon Protestants Only or No Jews or Negroes Wanted. Shanker recalls going to places where a room was advertised as available, being one of three people